Peaceful Japan grapples with wartime memories

U-T San Diego reporters Peter Rowe and John Wilkens explore how WWII shaped the “Greatest Generation” and our home. These stories will focus on local men and women who helped preserve our nation and re-create our city. The series is supported by U-T’s video partner, the Media Arts Center San Diego.

On the site of a POW camp 200 miles northwest of Tokyo, Yoshikazu Kondo hopes a dark chapter from Japan’s past will lead to a brighter future.

“We have to understand that war makes everybody unhappy and sometimes cruel,” said Kondo, 57, an architect who oversees a park here, commemorating the Naoetsu prison camp where more than 600 Allied captives lived and 60 died. “We need to refresh our memories of World War II. I think it is our duty to pass along this information to young people.”

Backed by supporters and attacked by protesters, this park reflects this nation’s ambivalence about “The Pacific War.” In the United States, World War II is widely seen as an honorable “good war” that ended in triumph nearly 70 years ago. But in Japan, the conflict ended in defeat — and still retains an immediate and explosive power. Across this prosperous and peaceful island nation, citizens continue to debate the war, why it was fought, what should be remembered and who should be mourned.

Dozens of parks, monuments and museums recall this era, all expressing a desire for peace. Most of these memorials ignore other nations’ casualties, though, focusing tightly on Japan’s staggering losses: 2.4 million dead, including 350,000 civilians.

Naoetsu is one of the few places to acknowledge Japan’s victims.

“What the public tends to remember is being bombed by B-29s, and Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Okinawa,” said Hatsue Shinohara, director of the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies at Tokyo’s Waseda University. “We started the war, but our sense of responsibility is not so clear.”

Shinohara is an academic, but this issue is not. Japan’s American-drafted postwar constitution bans a full-fledged military, leaving much of its defense to U.S. forces — including sailors and Marines from San Diego. In exchange, Washington seeks this democracy’s diplomatic assistance in defusing regional crises, from North Korean saber-rattling to Chinese trade disputes.

Those efforts are hampered by history, as other Asian nations retain vivid memories of Tokyo’s wartime aggression. South Korea is a fellow democracy and U.S. ally, yet weekly rallies outside Japan’s embassy in Seoul demand reparations for “comfort women” forced into prostitution by the Imperial Army. Wartime atrocities in China, especially the 1937 “Rape of Nanjing,” remain raw topics in Beijing.

Fresh salt was poured on these wounds last Sunday, when high-ranking Japanese officials visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where the nation’s war dead — including 13 “Class A” war criminals — are honored. Beijing objected; Seoul cancelled a scheduled trip to Japan by its foreign minister.

“The war in China, the war in the Pacific theater — we were the aggressor,” Shinohara said. “Somehow, the meaning of the war has been whitewashed.”

‘Stunning victory’

Spring came early to Tokyo this year, and by mid-March the blossoming cherry trees in Ueno Park were surrounded by photo-snapping sightseers. Fresh beginnings were also seen on the Nikkei stock exchange, where “Abenomics” — the fiscal policies of newly-elected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — seems to be lifting the economy.

Abe is also considering easing restrictions on Japan’s defense forces, since 1945 constitutionally limited to repelling attacks on the home islands. In Chinese and South Korea media, some critics warn that this as the first step toward renewing Tokyo’s militarism. Between 1905-1945, Japanese forces seized much of Asia and, without warning, dragged the U.S. into World War II by attacking Pearl Harbor.

That’s the standard narrative in American schools — and a gross oversimplification, argued Haruo Tohmatsu, a professor at the National Defense Academy of Japan.

The Pacific War, Tohmatsu insisted, was rooted in Japan’s long-simmering conflicts with Russia and China, plus later clashes with the U.S. Many Japanese scholars insist that Washington’s final insult was its 1941 imposition of an oil embargo, an unsuccessful effort to pressure Tokyo into withdrawing from China.

“All of these details are often ignored,” Tohmatsu said.

The professor acknowledged Japanese aggression and atrocities. “But we cannot criticize only one side.”

That’s not true at the Yushukan, a museum with two floors and one unapologetic side. Founded in 1931, the Yushukan and neighboring Yasukuni Shrine defend the old imperial order. Exhibits argue that Japan’s desire for peace was foiled by others’ treaty violations “and finally the oil embargo, which triggered the war.”

Pearl Harbor? A justified reaction to sinister Washington policies. The Bataan Death March? Ignored. So is the high death rate of Allied POWs in Japanese hands, although the plight of Soviet-held Japanese POWs is thoroughly aired.

This temple for ultranationalists presents World War II as a Japanese-led victory over Western imperialism, inspiring Gandhi and other opponents of colonial rule.

This is not a common view here or elsewhere. The Yushukan fails “to acknowledge that Japan’s pan-Asianist crusade, which claimed more than 10 million lives in China alone, came as a calamity to most Asians,” Indian writer Pankaj Mishra recently wrote at Bloomberg.com.

Even the Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage presents a more nuanced account. While focusing on the U.S. Army Air Corps’ March 1945 carpet-bombing of the capital, it also cites Japanese raids on Chinese cities.

“We try to show that air raids are not just something that happened here,” said Tadahito Yamamoto, the center’s chief researcher. “We want to show both Japan’s aggressor side and the victim side.”

If the center shows both sides, it’s felt attacked from all sides.

“We’ve been criticized by people who believed Japan needs to compensate people for injuries they suffered during the war,” Yamamoto said. “We were also criticized by our own people, who did not want to take the blame for starting the war.

“There’s a very delicate balance.”

The wrong mind

Because Japan suffered a devastating defeat, even aggressive wartime acts are sometimes presented as noble and tragic.

About 600 miles southwest of Tokyo, the rural town of Chiran is known for tea farms, restored samurai-era homes and 439 doomed aviators. Between March and June 1945, pilots based here flew off on kamikaze missions. These desperate attacks were launched when Tokyo realized that the Imperial Navy was helpless to halt the U.S. Navy.

“Japanese forces had to depend on their spiritual abilities,” said Takeshi Kawatoko, a guide at Chiran’s Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots. “The hope was the U.S. government would grow weary of the war, and the Japanese government could negotiate a more favorable peace treaty.”

The museum sits amid pines and cherry trees. In the spring, the ground’s ceremonial stone lanterns are dusted by delicate petals, like so many pink snowflakes. In this serene setting, it’s hard to imagine so much courage and carnage. Historians estimate that about 7,500 kamikazes flew to their deaths, sinking 120 vessels and killing more than 3,000 Allied sailors.

Photos of the pilots line the museum’s walls, while cases display affectionate farewell letters to loved ones.

“Some were no older than high school students,” said Kawatoko, who as a boy watched the fliers train. “People called them the ‘young boy pilots.’ I don’t think they knew they were going to be kamikaze pilots when they joined, but their morale was very high. They believed they were dying for their parents and for Japan.”

Kawatoko echoes that belief. The guide’s book, “The Mind of the Kamikaze,” condemns suicide attacks, it also maintains that Japan’s dramatic postwar recovery was inspired by the aviators’ lethal sacrifices.

“I think that is the reason why Japan has a strong economy and peaceful society,” he wrote.

Some historians, though, argue that the kamikazes’ suicidal resolve helped persuade the U.S. to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum reprints President Truman’s claim that nuclear weapons could “save thousands and thousands of young Americans.”

A port city surrounded by wooded hills, Nagasaki was home to shipyards, munitions factories and a hospital where Michiaki Ikeda’s mother worked as a nurse. On the morning of Aug. 9, 1945, 6-year-old Michiaki entered a hospital elevator around 11 a.m. Two minutes later, the doors opened on the ground floor.

“I stepped out and saw a brilliant light,” said Ikeda, now a volunteer at the Atomic Bomb Museum. “I fainted. When I woke up, there was the smell of something burning.”

Less than a half mile from ground zero, the dazed boy smelled bodies and buildings consumed in unbelievable heat (up to 7,050 degrees Fahrenheit) and winds (over 600 miles per hour). He ran into the hills. Although more than 100 shards of glass had cut his mother’s back, she survived. Neither mother nor son ever suffered from radiation sickness.

By December 1945, though, the bomb had killed 74,000 people and injured another 75,000. The museum contains photos of burn victims, their skin like raw hamburger; a clump of melted glass fused to bones from a human hand; rosaries excavated from the ruins of Urakami Cathedral, one of Japan’s largest Catholic churches.

Like Hiroshima, Nagasaki is now a vibrant city with more to offer that its nuclear nightmares: art museums, waterfront parks, gardens. It’s a cheerful place where Americans are welcomed — even by survivors like Ikeda, who maintains that he may have died in 1945 without the United States’ postwar shipments of food.

He noted that the Pacific War followed Tokyo’s victories in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).

“Sometimes,” he said, “winning these wars goes to the head of the government — and the people. We didn’t have the right mind.”

‘Very shocking’

Even within Japan, though, the Japanese were not the only ones to suffer. Thousands of Koreans were incinerated at Nagasaki and Hiroshima; so were some Allied POWs. And in camps across this country, POWs suffered from torture, malnutrition, exposure and overwork.

Laura Hillenbrand’s current best-seller, “Unbroken,” documents the savage treatment meted out to Australians and Americans at a prison camp in Naoetsu, now a neighborhood in the city of Joetsu.

Yoshikazu Kondo grew up here, yet knew little about the camp until 1995. That’s when former Australian POWs returned as honored guests for the dedication of the Naoetsu Peace Memorial Park & Museum. The American-educated Kondo escorted the Aussies and, warmed by their humor and baffled by their accent, read one of the camp survivor’s memoirs.

He was floored. “We had not had a very concrete explanation of the brutality of the Japanese guards,” he said. “But his writing did and it was very shocking to me.”

The Naoetsu park and its museum were inspired by an Australian cemetery, home to the remains of 800 Japanese POWs. Those prisoners died while attacking their guards, killing eight, but the Australians treated their remains with respect.

“When we knew that, we were so moved,” said Shoji Yamaga, one of the Naoetsu park’s founders. “We wanted to do something then with the former site of the Naoetsu camp.”

A few locals opposed the park. A plaque saluting the 60 prisoners who died here drew the ire of ultra-rightists. A park organizer was warned his home would be torched. But volunteers stood guard outside the house until the park opened, funded by donations from 80 percent of the area’s residents.

“We didn’t expect so many of the citizens to agree with our movement,” Yamaga said.

Another plaque, originally meant to honor eight guards executed by the Allies for war crimes, drew fire from both Japanese and Australians. As a result, the final inscription mentions no names. It reads: “Eight Stars in the Peaceful Sky.”

“They were criminals,” concluded Kondo. “But they were also victims of World War II.”

The Pacific War had complex roots, as the National Defense Academy’s Tohmatsu noted, and its legacy remains contentious. But near the Naoetsu park, a temple tells a war story of simple humanity. A monument here recalls the words of Enri Fujito, a Buddhist priest who reverently accepted the remains of cremated Australian POWs.